Monday, December 28, 2015

Welcome to the one hundred and fourth issue of LLVM Weekly, a weekly
newsletter (published every Monday) covering developments in LLVM, Clang, and
related projects. LLVM Weekly is brought to you by Alex
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Tim Jones (lecturer at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory) has
written about the alias analysis used in the HELIX
compiler.
There's nothing LLVM-specific here, indeed it was implemented using ILDJIT but
should be of general interest to compiler developers.

For a while now, Galina Kistanova has been posting statistics from the LLVM
buildbots.
This includes the number of commits for each project, the number of failed
builds, and average build time. I haven't linked to it before, so felt I
should rectify that.

LLVM commits

An initial implementation of an LLVMCodeView library has landed. This
implements support for emitting debug info in the CodeView format.
r256385.

lit has gained support for a per-test timeout which can be set using
--timeout=. r256471.

All uses of edge wights in BranchProbabilityInfo have been replaced with
probabilities. r256263.

The LLVM project documentation on patch reviews via Phabricator now has
advice on choosing reviewers. r256265.

The gc.statepoint intrinsic's return type is now a token type rather than
i32. r256443.

Clang commits

ASTtemplateKWAndArgsInfo and ASTTemplateArgumentListInfo have been converted
to use the TrailingObjects header. This abstracts away reinterpret_cast,
pointer arithmetic, and size calculations needed for the case where a class
has some other objects appended to the end of it.
r256359.

Other project commits

Development of LLD's new ELF linker is continuing, with support for new
relocations on x86, x86-64, and MIPS.
r256143,
r256144,
r256172,
r256416.